Category: Learning

 Next time you are out in your car, begin to notice how many people are either talking on the cell phone or texting. It’s amazing!

While sitting at a red light recently, I counted ten cars that passed me and seven of those people were on the phone. So I began to wonder…what the heck is everyone talking about?

I also began to wonder if 70 percent of the people that I randomly viewed at an intersection were gabbing away on the phone, then it stands to reason that our generation is technically “communicating more”. Therefore, we should be able to see a direct correlation in the fact that if we are communicating more we should see a reduction in statistics that weigh heavily in areas where communication plays a significant role in the breakdown of a relational system like a marriage.

Well, drum roll, please… In the early 1980s two significant seemingly “unrelated things” happened:

A. First, in the early 1980s the first fully automatic cellular networks were introduced to the American consumer market.

B. Also in the early 1980s, the divorce rate for the US peaked at its highest mark ever at 5.3 per 1000.

Since then two things have happened.

1. Each year the cellular phone usage has continued to steadily rise to a point wherein 2009, 66% of the people in the United States have a cell phone. This is the highest level ever.

2. Each year since the introduction of the cell phone, the divorce rate in the United States has continued to decline. In 2009, 3.6 marriages per 1000 end in divorce; the lowest divorce rate in 37 years.

So what does that tell me? Well, for one thing, we all know where we are and where we’re supposed to be! That’s a good thing. Secondly, we’re always available. Whether we choose to “pick up or not” when the phone rings…we know it…and so does the person on the other end.

Finally, it just proves the fact that the more we communicate, the better off we are.

So here’s to the cell phone! May it strengthen the bonds of eternal matrimony! I just wish those bonds weren’t being strengthened when driving in front of me on the highway.

I think I speak for all of us when I say, “just get off the phone and drive!”

The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. 

That meaning may come from work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage (exhibited during difficult times). 

 Things beyond your control can take away everything you have except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to a situation. 

 Life has meaning under any condition, even miserable ones. 

 Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. 

 Success is like happiness, it cannot be pursued; it must come afterward and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as a by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. 

 Happiness and success must happen by not caring about them. 

 Do what your conscience commands you to do and then do it to the best of your knowledge. Then in the long run, success will follow you because you have forgotten to think about it. 

 Pleasure is a by-product and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree it is made the goal itself. 

 We as humans must have the dynamic tension that is created by the never-ending quest to be more than we are. 

 We must never arrive at the destination we desire, for then life will have no further purpose for us. 

 When we stop growing, we die.